The Science of Smiling: A Guide to Human’s Most Powerful Gesturetag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00d8341c64b653ef01a73e0ba5a2970d2014-08-29T19:31:36-05:002014-08-29T19:31:36-05:00The Science of Smiling: A Guide to Human’s Most Powerful Gesture By Leo Widrich April 9, 2013 62 Comments Why did the Mona Lisa become one of the most famous paintings of all time? That’s a question an incredible amount...matosas

The Science of Smiling: A Guide to Human’s Most Powerful Gesture

Why did the Mona Lisa become one of the most famous paintings of all time? That’s a question an incredible amount of people have asked themselves in the past. And one possible answer is this: because of her unique smile.

The smile is is the “the symbol that was rated with the highest positive emotional content” concludes scientist Andrew Newberg. And for me personally, I’ve been very reluctant before embracing smiling. Only a few years back, when one of my teachers told me: “Why don’t you smile more? Go learn how to do it!”, I started to research learn about the actual power of smiling.

I had a brief moment of disbelief that anyone can learn how to smile better. And yet, since then, for many years, I practiced smiling in the mirror and on many other occasions. That’s a fact I’ve often been a little embarrassed to admit, yet the research of this post confirms how powerful practicing a bit of smiling can be.

The science of smiling: What happens to our brain when we smile

Let’s say you experience a positive situation and you see a friend you haven’t met in a long time. This means that neuronal signals travel from the cortex of your brain to the brainstem (the oldest part of our brains). From there, the cranial muscle carries the signal further towards the smiling muscles in your face.

Sounds simple enough right?

And yet, that’s only where it starts. Once the smiling muscles in our face contract, there is a positive feedback loop that now goes back to the brain and reinforces our feeling of joy. To put more succinctly:

“Smiling stimulates our brain’s reward mechanisms in a way that even chocolate, a well-regarded pleasure-inducer, cannot match.”

Smiling then, seems to give us the same happiness that exercising induces terms of how our brain responds. In short: our brain feels good and tells us to smile, we smile and tell our brain it feels good and so forth.

That’s why in a recent research scientists concluded“that smiling can be as stimulating as receiving up to 16,000 Pounds Sterling in cash.” Here is a brief description of the different muscles the cranial muscle activates in our face:

Real vs. Fake smiles – can we tell the difference?

Whenever we smile, there are 2 potential muscles we activate. The first one is the zygomaticus major and it controls the corners of your mouth. Whenever this muscle only is activated, it’s not actually a genuine smile. Scientists call this also the “social” smile. The second muscle, known to show sincerity is the obicularis occuli and it encircles our eye socket.

The true smile also called the duchenne smile, named after the famous scientist who first separated the “mouth corners”-only smile, from the “eye socket” one. Here is a comparison:

Our brain can in fact distinguish very easily between what’s real and what’s fake. In fact researcher Dr. Niedenthal argues there are 3 ways we can do so:

Our brain compares the geometry of a person’s face to a standard smile

We think about the situation and judge whether a smile is expected.

Most importantly: We automatically mimic the smile, to feel ourselves whether it is fake or real. If it is real, our brain will activate the same areas from the smiler and we can identify it as a real one.

Niedenthal then experimented with how important it is to be able to mimic smiles and whether we could still tell the genuine smiles from the fake ones:

Dr. Niedenthal and her colleagues asked the students to place a pencil between their lips. This simple action engaged muscles that could otherwise produce a smile. Unable to mimic the faces they saw, the students had a much harder time telling which smiles were real and which were fake.

So the fact that we can’t try it for ourselves, leaves us almost unable to identify any smile as fake or real. Why is this so important though to know what and what doesn’t trigger us to understand smiling? Here are some more insights:

What smiling does to our health, success and feeling of happiness

Smiling can change our brain, through the powerful feedback loop we discussed above. And your brain keeps track of your smiles, kind of like a smile scorecard. It knows how often you’ve smiled and which overall emotional state you are in therefore.

Smiling reduces stress that your body and mind feel, almost similar to getting good sleep, according to recent studies. And smiling helps to generate more positive emotions within you. That’s why we often feel happier around children – they smile more. On average, they do so 400 times a day. Whilst happy people still smile 40-50 times a day, the average of us only does so 20 times.

Why does this matter? Smiling leads to decrease in the stress-induced hormones that negatively affect your physical and mental health, say the latest studies:

In the famous yearbook study, they tracked the lives of women who had the best smiles in yearbook photos compared to the rest. Women who smiled the most lived happier lives, happier marriages and had fewer setbacks.Here is a sample of the women from the observed yearbook. I let you guess who was successful and who wasn’t:

The baseball card study also found a clear correlation between how big a smile someone made on a baseball card photo and how long they would live. The people who smiled the most turned out to live 7 years longer than those who didn’t.

Of course, the above only shows a correlation, and not a causation. And yet, I can’t help but agree that smiling breeds trust, makes you happier and helps you to live longer.

And most importantly, smiling can be learnt. Or to put more precisely, re-learnt. Most of us forget how to smile genuinely over time, as we adopt social smiles more and more. Here is a guide to get your genuine, duchenne smile back:

A 3 step guide to a better smile

Imagine a situation of joy before an event:

One of the best ways to make your smile more genuine and real comes from researcher Andrew Newberg:

“We just asked a person, before they engage in a conversation with someone else, visualize someone they deeply love, or recall an event that brought them deep satisfaction and joy. It’s such an easy exercise, and we train people to do it in our workshops.”

Personally, I’ve tried to do the same experiment before a phone call or even before writing an email. I’ve found that people can always tell if you have a smile on your face, even if they don’t see you. I’ve even tracked how this improves response rates to emails I send for Buffer related feature suggestions or partnerships for example. That should most likely be another blogpost.

Practice smiling in front of the mirror

Here is something I’ve done for almost a few years in the morning: Stand in front of the mirror and smile. Practice to activate both your mouth corners and your eye sockets. You will know whenever your smile is genuine, because you will immediately feel happy and relaxed. The power of a smile, even practiced in the mirror is that it can invoke the emotion immediately.

Become comfortable with smiling

A lot of people (myself included!) see smiling as something that makes you weak. Personally, I’ve found that developing a better smile starts with being very comfortable to smile a lot. If in your head, you can imagine yourself going through the day and smiling lots to everyone and everything, that’s often when a happier life starts.

Yes, this might be just a small change in thinking. And yet, for me personally, that was the most important part to smile more every day.

Quick last fact: Women smile more than Men, here is why

Here is something interesting. Researcher LaFrance concluded that overall women smile a lot more than men. This comes not just from the fact that they might be happier, but also, that socially, it is more acceptable for women to smile, she says. And it doesn’t stop there:

“In general women are more accurate than men in detecting what is really going on with someone by looking at their face and listening to their voice. Women are more likely to tell the difference between a felt and a fake smile.”

Smiling is definitely more than just a contraction of muscles in your face. In fact Mother Teresa’s “We shall never know all the good that a simple smile can do.” reaches probably even further than imagined. What have you discovered about smiling? I’d love your insights on this.

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6 Powerful Psychological Effects That Explain How Our Brains Tick

Many studies and much research has been invested into the how and why behind our everyday actions and interactions. The results are revealing. If you are looking for a way to supercharge your personal development, understanding the psychology behind our actions is an essential first step.

Fortunately, knowing is half the battle. When you realize all the many ways in which our minds create perceptions, weigh decisions, and subconsciously operate, you can see the psychological advantages start to take shape. It’s like a backstage pass to the way we work, and being backstage, you have an even greater understanding of what it takes to succeed.

The following 6 psychology facts can be viewed as a hacker’s guide to self-improvement, based on the brain’s default settings. So, that’s exactly what this is – your backstage pass to how our brain functions and how we can best avoid common misconceptions:

The Pratfall Effect - Your likability will increase if you aren’t perfect.

Don’t worry about tripping and falling in front of your boyfriend; doing so will only make him like you more. Go ahead and admit your failures to your friends; your humanness will endear yourself to them.

These mistakes attract charm as a result of the Pratfall Effect: Those who never make mistakes are perceived as less likeable than those who commit the occasional faux pas. Messing up draws people closer to you, makes you more human. Perfection creates distance and an unattractive air of invincibility. Those of us with flaws win out every time.

This theory was tested by psychologist Elliot Aronson. In his test, he asked participants to listen to recordings of people answering a quiz. Select recordings included the sound of the person knocking over a cup of coffee. When participants were asked to rate the quizzers on likability, the coffee-spill group came out on top.

Key Takeaway

The Pratfall Effect serves as a good reminder that it is okay to be fallible. Occasional mistakes are not only acceptable, they may turn out to be beneficial. So long as the mistakes are not critical and making mistakes does not compound a reputation for being unliked, the occasional pratfall can come in very handy. Pratfall away.

The crux of this psychological phenomenon is the concept of self-fulfilling prophecy: If you believe something is true of yourself, eventually it will be.

The first test of the Pygmalion Effect was performed by psychologist Robert Rosenthal and occurred in an elementary school classroom with first and second grade students. At the beginning of the year, all the students took an assessment test, and Rosenthal led the teachers to believe that certain students were capable of great academic achievement. Rosenthal chose these students at random, regardless of the actual results of the IQ tests.

At the end of the year, when the students were retested, the group of earmarked high achievers did indeed show improvement over their peers. Why was this? Later tests concluded that teachers subconsciously gave greater opportunities, attention, and feedback to the special group. Their expectations for this group were higher, and their expectations created the reality.

Rosenthal summarized his finding:

What one person expects of another can come to serve as a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The effect was dubbed “Pygmalion,” named after the Ovid tale of a sculptor who falls in love with one of his statues.

Key Takeaway

The applications for the Pygmalion Effect can have benefits for both personal development and leadership. Individually, you can challenge yourself with more difficult goals and tasks in an effort to rise to meet the challenge. As a leader, when you expect great things of your team, you may see improved performance in return.

The Paradox of Choice - The more choices we have, the less likely we are to be content with our decision.

Even if our ultimate decision is clearly correct, when faced with many choices, we are less likely to be happy with what we choose. No doubt this is familiar to you. When I eat out, I often second-guess my menu choice. When you buy a new car, you might toss and turn over the decision. A wealth of choices makes finding contentment that much harder.

To prove this paradox, psychologists Mark Lepper and Sheena Iyengar conducted an experiment on supermarket jam. At a gourmet food store, Lepper and Iyengar set up a display of high-quality jams and taste samples. In one test, they offered six varieties; another test, they offered 24. The results of the study showed that 30 percent of people exposed to the smaller selection ended up purchasing a jar of jam. Only 3 percent of the people exposed to the larger selection purchased jam.

The Bystander Effect was shown in a study by social psychologists Bibb Latane and John Darley. They watched students respond to the perceived choking of a fellow student in a nearby cubicle. When the test subjects felt they were the only other person there, 85 percent rushed to help. When the student felt there was one other person, 65 percent helped. When the student felt there were four other people, the percentage dropped to 31 percent.

You may have experienced the Bystander Effect in a group project at school. There is often one group member who puts off deadlines and assignments because of diffused responsibility: They assume someone else will pick up the slack.

Key takeaway

Be specific when you need help. Ask someone for help by name so as to remove the confusion of responsibility. This is especially counterintuitive since we naturally assume saying to a larger group to help us will encourage more people to jump in, when really the opposite is the case. To avoid frustration, pick out 1 person only every time.

The Spotlight Effect - Your mistakes are not noticed as much as you think

The perception of our being under constant scrutiny is merely in our minds, and the paranoia and self-doubt that we feel each time we make a mistake does not truly reflect reality. According to the Spotlight Effect, people aren’t paying attention at our moments of failure nearly as much as we think.

To test the Spotlight Effect, a team of psychologists at Cornell asked a group of test subjects to wear an embarrassing T-shirt (featuring a picture of Barry Manilow’s face) and estimate how many other people had noticed what they were wearing. The estimations of the test subjects were twice as high as the actual number.

Key takeaway

You are under the spotlight less often than you think. Acknowledging this should lead to increased comfortability and relaxation in public settings and more freedom to be yourself. More so, when you do make a mistake, you can rest easy knowing that its impact is far less than you think. Psychologist Kenneth Savitsky puts it this way:

You can’t completely eliminate the embarrassment you feel when you commit a faux pas, but it helps to know how much you’re exaggerating its impact.

The Focusing Effect - People place too much importance on one aspect of an event and fail to recognize other factors

“Nothing In Life Is As Important As You Think It Is, While You Are Thinking About It” – Daniel Kahneman

How great is the difference in mood between someone who earns high income and someone who earns lower income? The difference does exist, but it is one-third less significant than most people expect. This illustrates the Focusing Effect; in the income example, the factor of income as it relates to mood overshadows the myriad other circumstances at play.

How much happier is a Californian than a Midwesterner? When psychologists posed this question to residents of both areas, the answer from each group was that Californians must be considerably happier. The truth was that there was no difference between the actual happiness rating of Californians and Midwesterners. Respondents were focusing on the sunny weather in California and the easy-going lifestyle as the predominant factors in happiness when in fact there are many other, less publicized aspects of happiness that Midwesterners enjoy: low crime, safety from earthquakes, etc.

Marketers use Focusing Effect (also called focusing illusion) on consumers by convincing them of the necessary features of a product or service. Politicians, too, use focusing to exaggerate the importance of particular issues.

Key takeaway

To combat this effect, it is important to remember to keep perspective, look at problems from many angles, and weigh several factors before making a decision. The downfall of the Focusing Effect is that it can lead to mistakes in predicting future outcomes. If you can avoid tunnel vision (or at least acknowledge that it may exist), you can improve your chances of making a sound choice.

Over to you now. Have you ever experienced some of these psychological effects before? If so, how did you deal with overcoming them? I’d love to hear your thoughts on the topic and see what the best ways are to combat them.

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Awesome, actionable social media advice. Delivered daily.tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00d8341c64b653ef01a73e0ba230970d2014-08-29T18:59:20-05:002014-08-29T19:03:43-05:00Buffer makes managing social media fun and easy. Sign Up. It’s Free. How To Rewire Your Brain for Positivity and Happiness By Walter Chen January 31, 2013 35 Comments The following post is a guestpost by Walter Chen, founder of...matosas

The unfortunate superpower of the negative is that it has a stronger impact than the positive.

In fact negative impact of setbacks in your work is three times as powerful in affecting motivation than positive progress. It’s just easier to remember the bad stuff that has happened to you during the day than the good.

So why is it, that our brains have a such a negativity bias? The reason is quite simple: They’re actually wired to pay more attention to negative experiences. It’s a self-protective characteristic. We are scanning for threats from when we used to be hunter and gatherers. But such vigilance for negative information can cause a narrowing, downward spiral and a negative feedback loop that doesn’t reflect reality.

Fortunately, we aren’t doomed by our natural disposition towards negativity. What’s amazing is that we have the ability to break out of that negative feedback loop and we can actually rewire our brains to think positively. Understanding how the brain can refashion its own connections is the key to unlocking the durable power of positive thinking.

And that’s exactly what this post is all about. Let’s dive in:

The Tetris Effect: What it tells us about how our brains learn new things

Anyone who’s ever played the classic, old-school game of Tetris will know this. Whether on a clunky computer or gameboy or the latest mobile device we all know the game’s surreal ability to spill into real life. After you shut off the game, you still see those Tetris blocks falling in your mind’s eye.

You’re grocery shopping, and you find yourself thinking about rearranging items on grocery shelves and carts in the parking lot. Somehow your mind continues to play the game, even when you’re physically not.

Robert Stickgold, Harvard professor of psychiatry, noticed something similar after a day’s hiking a mountain in Vermont. That night, he dreamt that he was still going through the motions of mountain hiking, clinging to rocks. Curious about this dream replay he tried something: Stickgold got a group of college students of varying skill levels to play Tetris and sleep in the Harvard sleep lab.

Over 60% of the study participants (including, surprisingly, those who suffered from amnesia) reported dreams of images of Tetris pieces falling, rotating, and fitting together. Interestingly, half the Tetris expert participants reported such Tetris dreams while 75% of the novices did. The mind was continuing to work on making sense of the game during sleep.

A more recent study from 2009 it was found that playing Tetris can grow your brain and make it more efficient. Adolescent girls played the game for an average of 1.5 hours a week over three months. The cerebral cortex, or the gray matter, of the girls grew thicker while brain activity in other areas decreased compared to when they’d started. Richard Haier, who had previously found in a 1992 study that there was a “Tetris learning effect” in which the brain consumed less energy as mastery of the game rose, concluded,

“[W]e think the brain is learning which areas not to use. . . . As you learn the game, it becomes more automatic.”

Haier’s 2009 study demonstrated how Tetris affected the brain’s plasticity, or the brain’s ability to change structurally, as the girls practiced and learned how to play the game. Neurons, or nerve cells, in your brain make connections, communicating through synapses. When you learn something, you change those neural connections. Every time you reactivate a circuit, synaptic efficiency increases, and connections become more durable and easier to reactivate. Stickgold’s study and subsequent research that sleep plays a role in this memory process.

So to sum up, whenever you do specific tasks over and over again, they take up less of your brain power over time. And that’s pretty amazing, as this will be the basis for a huge opportunity to change our behavior for the better:

So how can we combat our negativity bias? The Positive Tetris Effect.

Indeed, it’s quite simple: We can harness the brain’s plasticity by training our brain to make positive patterns more automatic. When we practice looking for and being more aware of positive aspects of life, we fight off the brain’s natural tendency to scan for and spot the negatives. Naturally we bring ourselves into better balance.

Shawn Achor frames this rewiring as “The Positive Tetris Effect” in The Happiness Advantage, drawing from the way Tetris impresses our brain so that we end up parsing the world in terms of the game. According to Achor, with the positive Tetris Effect,

“we can retrain the brain to scan for the good things in life—to help us see more possibility, to feel more energy, and to succeed at higher levels.”

Yes, so something as trivial as the game of Tetris can have a scientifically measurable effect on people’s brains and invade their dreams. If that’s the case, the impact of practicing and retaining a more positive thinking pattern, especially on our wellbeing and happiness, can be even more powerful.

We are basically trying to find an undiscovered path that if walked once, makes us happy. The path being the synaptic connections in our brain. And then, because we enjoy it, we go along that path, hundreds and hundreds of times. Slowly a track forms and becomes very clear and easier to walk every time.

Here is an example of a synapse, which represents the path we want to go over and over again, to make it a strong, easy to recognize pattern for our brains:

The best thing about such a practice is its long-term effects. In one study, people who did a “three good things” exercise for a week felt happier and less depressed after one month. The study then did the three-month and six-month follow-ups. Not surprisingly, the happiest participants were the ones who had continued the practice throughout.

What this tells me right of the bat is this: There’s hope for us all! (Even for a curmudgeon like me who reacts to the idea of spending time trying to accentuate the positive with a growl.)

So I think a good way to see the positive Tetris Effect like learning a foreign language. It will be the most difficult and unnatural-feeling at the beginning. And yet, the rewards will make you feel unbelievably happier if you stick with it.

4 Awesome Ways to Change Your Life to Be More Lastingly Positive

Ok, now that we’ve been through the background it’s time to get our hands dirty. How can we put all of this into practice?

At the core, the Tetris Effect is about building a habit that becomes more automatic and therefore longer lasting. In turn, this will sustainably boost your productivity and creativity. As Achor notes,

“Happiness is a work ethic . . . . It’s something that requires our brains to train just like an athlete has to train.”

So with that in mind here are some of the top ways that Achor and others identified to rewire your brain for positivity:

Scan for the 3 daily positives. At the end of each day, make a list of three specific good things that happened that day and reflect on what caused them to happen. The good things could be anything — bumping into an old friend, a positive remark from someone at work, a pretty sunset. Celebrating small wins also has a proven effect of powering motivation and igniting joy. As you record your good things daily, the better you will get and feel.

Give one shout-out to someone (daily). I love this technique and it is also something the Buffer team is using internally. Take the positive things you’re getting better at recognizing and let people know you’ve noticed! Take a minute to say thanks or recognize someone for their efforts, from friends and family to people at work. A great way to go about this is by sending 1 daily email to someone. It can be your old school teacher, who’s advice you are now appreciating every day. A co-worker or someone you’ve only met. Show courage and say thanks, I love doing this and just checking in with a nice note.

Do something nice.Acts of kindness boost happiness levels. Something as small and simple as making someone smile works. Pausing to do something thoughtful has the power to get you out of that negativity loop. Do something nice that is small and concrete like buying someone a coffee. You can try and have that even on your to do list – have you done anything nice for someone today? I love this technique and it’s one of the most amazing ways to feel happier.

Mind your mind. Mindfulness is paying attention to the present moment without judgment. Opening our awareness beyond the narrowness of negativity can help bring back more balance and positivity into the picture.

The regular practice of mindfulness meditation has also been shown to affect the brain’s plasticity, increasing gray matter in the hippocampus, an area of the brain important for learning, memory, and emotion, and reducing gray matter in the amygdala, an area of the brain associated with stress and anxiety. Take a look at these tips on mindfulness and meditation to get started.

Over to you now. Have you discovered some of these techniques to focus on creating more happiness for yourself? I’d love your thoughts on this topic.

About the author: Walter Chen is the co-founder of iDoneThis, a simple way to preserve and celebrate progress at work, every day, that amazing companies like Zappos, Shopify, and reddit use. He’d love to hear from you on Twitter at @smalter.

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